Nokia N95: Ultra first impressions

My thoughts on the N95, posted elsewhere first:

I’ve had one for 2 weeks now. Its terrible. Actually let me qualify that – the individual elements of it are great – the screen is lovely, media playback is nice. However put them all together and you have a phone that is a real mess, and unfortunately another example of Nokia’s race to have lots of features that look great on paper, and forgetting the basics.

For example, the phone doesn’t have any central awareness of its state of connectedness – if you download and use the podcasting application it doesn’t care if you are already connected to the internet via wireless lan, it makes you disconnect first, and then choose a new access point. No doubt that’s down to how the series 60 operating system works but its stupid. You cannot choose a default wireless lan point and match it with a default WAP access point – you can make one the default for each application, or you can be asked every single time.

The screen causes a high pitch whistle during phone calls (although you have to be young/have decent hearing to hear that – I can only hear it with one ear).

I also found that if you set the phone to use a default wireless lan access point, and it can’t find it, the phone will crash.

Camera – 5 megapixel but HUGE delay between pressing the button and the picture being taken, even more so if the flash is involved.

Sat Nav is nice, but will drain the battery in 15 minutes so buy a car charger. It also seems to use a data connection throughout the journeys. Had a couple of glitches where it stopped tracking where we were, and “at the next roundabout……” nothing. Incidentally, a 1.5 hour sat nav assisted trip from Berkshire to Warminster with a couple of suggested course corrections caused the phone to use 3 meg of data.

You will NEED an unlimited data bundle – just opening the (other web site) homepage causes 300 KB of data according to the phone, so any browsing and you’ll run up a very large data bill.

RSS feeds are accessed via the web browser, rather than being their own stand alone applicaion as found in SonyEricsson phones. I prefer the way SE do it – for me RSS feeds are all about reading stuff in a dedicated application, rather than reading it as another web page.

Oh, and Nokia have seen fit not to put a hard cover over the screen, so you can squash the LCD crystals with your finger – god knows what the long term effect of having it in your pocket with your keys is going to be like.

Hey,

what is the battery like on one of them?